Brocato, longtime scout for Oilers-Titans, dies of cancer

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) C.O. Brocato, who scouted players over four decades with the Houston Oilers-Tennessee Titans, has died. He was 85.

His daughter, Becky, told the Titans that Brocato died Tuesday in Arlington, Texas, from cancer.

Brocato joined the Houston Oilers in 1974 for the first of three seasons as a scout before leaving to scout for the United States Scouting Combine. Brocato rejoined the Oilers in 1981 as a scout and had a variety of jobs with the franchise, including scouting consultant, even as the team relocated to Tennessee in 1997.

His career spanned 599 games with the franchise, and Brocato was among the preliminary nominees for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005, 2007 and 2008.

The Titans named the draft room in honor of Brocato in April, and general manager Ruston Webster called this a sad day for the franchise and the NFL losing a man he thinks should be in the Hall of Fame.

''His handprints are all over the National Football League to the drills that he came up that we run at the combine every year to the way he went about scouting and trained others to be scouts, the pride he took in his progression,'' Webster said after practice. ''I think he is a person that made the sport of football and scouting and the NFL better because he was part of it.''

Webster credited Brocato with devising the three-cone drill and the backpedal and turn drill among others to help scouts better measure players. How Brocato timed players with a stopwatch also was mimicked by other scouts.

Brocato went to Baylor and was the football coach at Jesuit High School in Louisiana between 1958 and 1967. He was defensive coordinator in 1968 at Northern Arizona and then at Texas-Arlington between 1971 and 1974 before going to work for the Oilers.

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